Category: the deep

I think people who believe in a life after death and those who don’t are both wrong. Or both right, depending on how you look at it. Reality is beyond pairs of opposites. Its not a static thing, its constantly created in the present moment. Its like the crest of a wave, a thing we can conceive of that both exists and does not exist. Yes, there’s water in motion, forming a crest, but its never the same. The thing we call a wavecrest exists only in our minds.
Think about it.
Imagine you were a new born baby who knew nothing about the world. Suppose then you closed your eyes and tried to imagine it — the world, all of it, from microscopic life to the vastness of space;
From chocolate pudding to the love of one old couple to world war.
Think you, an innocent infant, could do it? I doubt it. And deep down, so do you, I think.
In like wise, you cannot imagine what lies beyond “that further shore from whose borne no traveler has returned”, try as you might. But that failure says nothing about what we may or may not actually be in for. We just don’t know. Why can’t we just admit it?

I commit my words to the deep, and if by some chance they may someday be recovered and bring something — anything at all — with them to you, then let them also bring a blessing, and a caution: as the length of our lives are to eternity, so is the breadth of our understanding to reality.
To be present on this earth so briefly, and to be gone so long, it is bittersweet: a warm golden dewey sunrise, a crimson fire sunset. A brief day between, and that is all. How many sunsets may a barren cliff witness, itself awesome in its beautiful ancientness? Yet the cliff does not perceive the beauty — neither that of the sun, nor its own. That gift, however, is given to us. Let us employ it nobly!
Cherish those around you, for they are your world. Cherish your dreams, for they are your destiny. And remember: all that remains of you after you’ve gone are the consequences of your actions. So act well! Be conscious! Do good! Love, and allow yourself to be loved. Think! Feel! Dream big dreams and then endeavor to make them come true. What else is there to do?

religious faith is so flexible. in the face of obviously contradictory evidence, we have devised increasingly
elaborate schemes to explain the apparent discongruity between what we believe and what we observe.
a careful reading of new testament scripture, even just focusing on the canonical body, but even more so when
one takes into account contemporaneous apocrypha as contextual, we see that many if not all of the most devout
of Jesus’ followers were convinced that the end days were imminent. Jesus himself alludes to it elliptically
and ambiguously once or twice, “Amen I say to you, the day is coming soon…”
but in the intervening millenia, the day Jesus referred to appears not to have come, and well, let’s say, it
gives new and unexpected meaning to the word “soon”.
we don’t let that get in our way, however, as we focus on other aspects of the message.
it is in this way that the political dialog around war runs in a circular argument. we enter an
ill-conceived, wrong-headed engagement applying the full the force of our massive military, with “shock and
awe” tactics.
the policy is informed by a kind of religious faith, that while referring to a desirable end state, does not
provide us with a rational path from where we are to that result.
we “sell” the war using fabricated evidence, and mislead ourselves as to our ultimate objectives. first, we
tell the world that we have hard evidence that a rogue nation is in possession of functioning nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons, and that this nation is threatening to use those weapons agains us and our
“friends” (meaning, of course, israel, though curiously no one ever says it out loud).
the public is not given specifics on all this, but our allies in the u.n. and nato remain unconvinced after
being briefed. their stubborn refusal to accept the lies results in a complete breakdown in communication,
and active calumny, with some in the administration insinuating the recalcitrant allies are cowards or worse.
so we go in, pretty much alone, guns ablazing. we accomplish the objective of rendering the nation a
disaster, and ultimately removing the dictator. but then things start to go terribly wrong.
now, no weapons were found despite a multimillion dollar nationwide hunt. so we respin the motiviation for
the war as that of “liberation” of a people from their oppressive dictator. nevermind that the people didn’t
ask to be liberated, perhaps they dared not, but how many other evil despots are there in the world? are we
to depose them all? and replace them with what?
assuming we did want to, which we obviously don’t in the case of dictators friendly to us, such as musharraf
of pakistan in particular, and others too numerous to mention, assuming we did want to rid the world of
despots, do we really have the capacity? do we even have the right? some cases may be more clear cut than
others.
that’s my point. things aren’t so simple as our current administration seems to think.
and so, we “liberate” a nation, that seems to be at least as interested in liberating themselves from us as
they were in liberating themselves from their tyrant, but things go terribly wrong.
hundreds die, daily bombings and attacks take several u.s. lives each day, and those few friends who did join
us in the early days of the war are withdrawing.
and with each reversal, in the world of the faithful, the argument for renewed committment grows stronger —
we can’t let those lives be lost in vain. to quit now would be disaster — like an article of religious
faith, its a circular argument that justifies itself, and is not subject to rational analysis.